


tabula rasa

by inkandcayenne



Category: True Detective
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-26
Updated: 2014-07-26
Packaged: 2018-02-10 11:09:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2022891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkandcayenne/pseuds/inkandcayenne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A short biography of Rust's ledger.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tabula rasa

**Author's Note:**

> Previously posted on Tumblr. Comments are much appreciated!

I.

Cohle’s crouched down low, knees akimbo, notebook open to its first blank page and turned horizontally so he can trace the outline of the body splayed on the floor before them. Marty nudges him with the side of his foot. “Hey. They want you canvassing the block while I question the vic’s mother.”

He rises to his feet slowly with a resigned sigh, closes the ledger, and tucks the pen away on the front cover next to a matching ballpoint, a red sharpie, and three binder clips. Marty sees a flash of annoyance cross his heretofore expressionless face. “New guy gets the grunt work. I get it.”

He’s not wrong, but Marty Hart does not like being second-guessed by some unknown quantity only three days on the job. “Look, she’s pretty shook up, and no offense but you don’t exactly strike me as a warm and fuzzy presence. So quit your bitchin’ and go find me some witnesses.”

A curt nod and he lopes away with that weird walk he has, like his joints are held together with fraying rope. Through the open window (it’s hot for late September, and the stabbing victim isn’t exactly perfuming up the place) Marty sees him cross the yard to the next-door neighbor’s, knock on the door with two sharp raps, and take his ever-present notebook out from under his arm. Hears the disinterested drone that everyone’s already starting to find so off-putting: “Evenin,’ ma’am, I’m with the State Police.”

“What’s with the fuckin’ notebook?” Geraci asks.

It’s a stupid thing to pick on, but he’s already locked on to Cohle like a schoolyard bully. Marty suspects that won’t end well for Steve; the new guy’s quiet but he’s got backbone. “Says he likes to take a lot of notes. Sketches, too—drawings of the scene. They’re not bad.” He aims for an offhanded tone, unsure of why he feels defensive; he didn’t get that way about the last two partners, and he liked them a hell of a lot more.

“He looks like a damn census taker with that thing,” Lutz says. “Or the tax man.”

Marty returns to the car an hour later to find Rust with the ledger on his lap, door kicked open to keep the interior light on as the sun sets. He’s sketching out a rough map of the area, flipping back and forth through the pages to consult his notes. He pulls the red marker off the front cover and uses it to trace a line leading away from the victim’s back door. “Sounds like he took off along this street and then headed toward the north-east about three and a half hours ago,” he says. “The river would’ve hemmed him in, so we’ll probably find him holed up in one of those hunting cabins out behind the lake.” And goddamned if they don’t.

II.

By the end of the Ledoux case the ledger is as familiar to him as his own coffee cup or the weight of his keys in his pocket. It’s become a sort of scrapbook, full of sketches, photos of Lange and Olivier, photocopies from the Light of the Way yearbook. Rust glues them to the pages so they won’t fall out when it’s opened—actually  _glues_  them, sonofabitch keeps a glue stick his desk drawer, like they’re in the fucking third grade.

When the interviews with the shooting board are finally done, they’re back in the car again, looking for the brother-in-law of a twenty-year-old found outside St. Francisville with a bullet in his head. When Rust pauses to jot down a few names, Marty notices that he’s on the pristine front page of an identical but brand-new ledger. “Christ, looks just like the last one.”

Turns out there’s an office surplus store just over the state line in Bridge City that carries his favorite style, black with 250 unlined pages and an elastic band to hold the cover closed. He goes there every November and buys twenty. “Black Friday sale,” he says, deadpan, and Marty hears himself burst out laughing for the first time since Maggie left.

“Black Friday sale,” he echoes. “Never thought I’d hear those damn words come out of your mouth.”

III.

In the ten years after (his brain doesn’t seem to want to put words to it, like  _infidelity_  or  _parking lot_ , so he simply thinks  _after_ ), when Marty goes into a bookstore for true crime novels or Sudoku puzzles or hunting magazines, he makes a wide berth around the front of the store where the stationery is displayed. Most of the time he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it.

IV.

“Hang on,” Rust says, “I gotta get something out of my truck.”

“Come the fuck on,” Marty says impatiently. “Buy me a beer, help me stop a serial killer, drive me to my secret lair, hang on while I get something out of my truck. Christ, you’re a pain in my ass.”

“Am I detecting some suppressed anger there, Marty?” Rust says, lighting a cigarette.

“Ain’t  _suppressed_. And you’re not smoking in my fucking car.”

Rust doesn’t reply, just reaches inside his red F-250 ( _how is that damn thing still on the road_ ) and grabs something from the front seat before sliding into the passenger seat beside Marty.

The once-familiar sight of Rust getting into the car hits him first, a wave of nostalgia like a fist in the throat—the way he always slid in knees-first, negotiating his long, gangly limbs under the dashboard; the way he’d always jerk at the seatbelt a couple of times, as if testing its slack, before buckling it into place ( _wanna make sure it’ll hold in case you ever flip this fucking thing, Marty, sometimes you get so fired up fussin’ at me you don’t watch the goddamn road_ ). But it’s what he’s holding on his lap that makes Marty almost burst into laughter, in spite of his annoyance and the general stress of the situation.

“Jesus Christ. Jesus  _fucking_  Christ. You still carrying that thing around?”

Rust looks down at the ledger in his lap and gives an inarticulate grunt in response. He still hasn’t put his cigarette out. Same two black ballpoints clasped to the cover, red sharpie, three binder clips. Holy hell, the more things change.

“You still buy ‘em in Bridge City every Black Friday?” Marty asks, and the words feel wrong in his mouth somehow—too casual, too friendly, too much like what had passed for small talk in this car ten years before.

Rust exhales a long stream of smoke into the air and Marty, with a resigned sigh, hits the button to lower the power windows. “Nope,” he answers finally. “Place shut down while I was away. Buy ‘em on the internet, now.”

“No shit.”

“They got this thing called ‘Cyber Monday,’” Rust says, and Marty does start laughing, then.

V.

They’d brought his car back to the station after the ambulance had taken them to Lafayette, parked it with the impounded vehicles. Papania gives him a ride when he gets out of the hospital.

“Glad you’re friend’s gonna be okay,” he says after a long silence.

“Hell you are.”

“You’re right. Motherfucker’s weird. Might’ve been wrong about him being a murderer but I’m not wrong about that.”

“No,” Marty admits, “you’re not. Guess I’ve grown accustomed to it.”

The world seems to big, too wide, too bright after three weeks in that sterile space. He gets distracted by sunlight filtering through the trees as he’s driving back to his apartment ( _Christ, Marty, watch the fuckin’ road_  a familiar voice says in his head) and he finds himself pulling up too fast to a stoplight. He hits the brakes and the momentum makes something come skidding out from under the passenger seat. Rust’s fucking notebook, where he’d written down Childress Sr.’s address before they headed out and tucked a road map of South Louisiana in the back cover ( _put that thing away, Marty, you know you can’t trust GPS on these back-ass country roads_ ).

He arrives at his place, leans over and picks the ledger up off the floorboard. The pens and marker are missing; damn thing looks naked without them. He walks to the passenger side of the car and crouches down, wincing at the pain from the stitches in his chest. It takes him five full minutes of rooting around under the seat to find the missing pens.

When he gets inside and settles on the couch, he puts them in their rightful place on the front cover and then, curious, opens the notebook.

Sticks and spirals; a hastily sketched map of the coast; family trees.  _Toby Boelert, 26, NOLA. Solic. charges 2009. aka “Johnny-Joanie.” Shepherd’s Flock 1988 (age 4) w/MF. Children drugged—animal masks—“men taking pictures, sometimes other things.”_ Underlined heavily:  _scars_.

Marty snaps the cover shut and makes his way to the bathroom to vomit.

VI.

“Hey.” Marty tosses a badly wrapped package on the kitchen table, where it lands next to Rust’s coffee. “Happy birthday, asshole.”

Rust raises his eyes, narrows them slightly. “How’d you know—” He’d guarded that information carefully— _yeah, I know you won’t make a fuss, but you’ll tell Maggie and she will. I don’t need no goddamn birthday cake, Marty, just leave it the hell alone._ (His old man had never paid them much mind:  _we live our lives according to seasons, son. Years are a human invention._ )

“I’m a detective, that’s how I fucking knew. Known since ‘96. You gonna open it or not?”

Rust slides his finger under the tape and loosens it with a precision that Marty, a lifetime giftwrap-tearer, finds unaccountably frustrating. He pushes the paper aside to reveal a journal a little smaller than the others—half an inch, maybe—but with the same elastic strap. The imitation leather cover is not black but a deep, ruddy brown like tilled earth.

“Couldn’t find one that looked just like the ones you had before,” Marty says, and they both know it’s not precisely true.

“It’s not bad, Marty,” he says, cracking open the cover and bending it back carefully. “Say, you got a pen?”


End file.
